8 ms·

A search engine for your personal network of high-quality websites

184 points by tambourine_man 4y ago

Brajeshwar 4y ago
Hey, I tried signing up but the "Magic Link" never sent me an email.
Alifatisk 4y ago
I like the idea, I'll give this site a try and come back with some feedback. Update, the quota of "10 free searches per month." is not enough for me to try out. Still, interesting idea.
- mthoms 4y ago
  Where were you able to find that? I'm so sick of services that hide their pricing or free trial restrictions until after you have signed up. These days, they are an immediate "NO" from me. If the team is that customer hostile from the start, how are they going to act later when you've become invested in their service? Startups: Just be upfront about what you are offering and let me decide if it's worth it. /rant
  - Alifatisk 4y ago
    I understand you. I had to sign in to find that out.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      Yeah, that's a total showstopper for me. If I have to sign up to find out the terms and pricing, then I'm not signing up.
      - crispinb 4y ago
        I can't see how this isn't a basic decency filter for anyone using any web site. A paid site must at a minimum make the price easy to find. Otherwise I won't even continue to read or browse, let alone sign up. I'm gone, and I won't be back.
    - GolDDranks 4y ago
      I signed up, but turns out I couldn't search even once. It, for reason showed that I have already used 10/10 of my searches. Seems like a bug.
    - Atlas22 4y ago
      Yup, same here. Was under the impression that it was free. I don't see any option to delete my account now either, awesome. :|
      - 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
        Thanks for TOFTT
- vignesh_warar 4y ago
  Hey, I will increase the quota to 20 free searches per month. Thanks! I just realized that 10 will not be enough.
techdragon 4y ago
I’ve built several variations of a “Grep” search engine, and it usually stops at “I can’t find a ranking algorithm to go with regular expression searching the internet”. I say this to highlight that I really wasn’t expecting the pricing model and search method that’s in use here when I heard the site was “grep”
JohnFen 4y ago
What is it with newer projects coopting the name of existing stuff lately? First it was the term "crypto", then it's "LoRa", and now we have a "grep" that isn't. This is quickly becoming a pet peeve of mine, as it's really polluting search results if you want to find the original things.
- youssefabdelm 4y ago
  Agree, but it's obvious why... this is how they get clicks
- b33j0r 4y ago
  Here’s one for ya. The very first thing ever named in [one biblical version of] history was “apple.” Unlike other disputes that people claim are ancient… the Apple dispute is still being fought, from Newton to the Beatles to genetically pure Honeycrisp. Naming things is still the Lord’s most difficult commandment (probably a reference to RMS, I’m not sure anymore).
  - schoen 4y ago
    > The very first thing ever named in [one biblical version of] history was “apple.” I'm not sure how to get that! The first noun in Genesis is either "beginning" or "God", depending on whether you take בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית as something like an adverb. (1:1) The first noun mentioned as spoken is "light". (1:3) The first noun mentioned as spoken in a conversation involving a human is "earth". (1:28) The first noun mentioned as spoken by a human is either "time" or "bone", depending on whether you take הַפַּעַם as something like an adverb. (2:23)
    - chrismorgan 4y ago
      … and there’s no apple at all. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not identified with any tree now known, nor is its fruit identified.
      - b33j0r 4y ago
meremortal 4y ago
I'm a software developer for search technology platforms and this choice for a name is a terrible one. facepalm It would have been much much smarter to choose a term that wasn't already broadly used. Even more mystifying is that someone would do this IF THEY KNEW ANYTHING ABOUT SEARCH ENGINES. Pick a different name, don't make your new offering compete with thousands of other search results explaining how GNU grep works. An even bigger sin is the fact that grep is already used for searching and if even someone is looking for your site after forgetting the website, they are gonna have a fun time finding your offering vs scads of linux tutorials. This is BASIC marketing level SEO knowledge, you don't even need a search architect to tell you this info. Good luck in any case. Do yourself a favor and pick another name if you want any traction.
- lisasays 4y ago
  Even more mystifying is that someone would do this IF THEY KNEW ANYTHING ABOUT SEARCH ENGINES. This is BASIC marketing level SEO knowledge, you don't even need a search architect to tell you this info. I agree. The irony here is simply profound.
- dang 4y ago
  Name complaints are generally covered by these guidelines from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - chrismorgan 4y ago
    I think name complaints are actually more reasonable here than they often are, especially as demonstrated in this comment you’re responding to: a search engine has to concern itself with such matters, so when a search engine deliberately names itself provocatively⸻ Anyway, I’m stopping there. I just thought this perspective worth mentioning.
darkteflon 4y ago
Wonderful idea. I pay for Kagi and would happily pay for something like this (Kagi sort of has an analogue, called “lenses”). But, as other commenters have (imo correctly) pointed out: absolute head-scratcher of a name - especially for a _search _ engine. So much so that it makes me question their judgement more broadly. And, concealed pricing info is a flat-out non-starter for me.
- vignesh_warar 4y ago
  Thanks for feedback. Here is the reason why we liked the name. Grep is a great CLI tool that always gives the right answers if your query is correct. I wanted Grep.help to do the same for your personal network. > And, concealed pricing info is a flat-out non-starter for me. I will mention this on the front page of grep.
  - jarofgreen 4y ago
    There is another serious point about the name I haven't yet seen any comments on. Grep the open source project has spent years building up it's name and it's good will by being - as you point out - a great tool. You are now attempting to claim some of that good will just by copying the name when you have nothing to do with grep. If you did that to a commercial company they'd sue you for trademark infringement. (Hopefully this is a serious enough point to not count as a "tangential annoyance")
    - kashyapc 4y ago
      It's absolutely not a "tangential annoyance" in this case. Your serious point is critical and it must be considered.
  - prox 4y ago
    I’ve seen dang’s comment but I agree here. While it’s great you admire a tool, overwriting it with a similar name is bad form and delutes your message instead of strengthening your message as you intended. Personally I would reconsider a name that may sound similar but also is different enough.
up6w6 4y ago
I guess it isn't related to grep.app, which is an excellent code search engine, right?
GolDDranks 4y ago
Hmm, I tried it with one query, and it immediately said "Search quota exceeded, please upgrade". I got the impression that there would be at least a few free queries, so it seems like a bug?
- lucb1e 4y ago
  CGNAT maybe or sharing your IP address with others some other way? It worked for me, I tried 3 queries if that helps.
  - vignesh_warar 4y ago
    We don't log IP address.
- vignesh_warar 4y ago
  Could you kindly clear the cache and try again?
djha-skin 4y ago
My minor annoyance at the name overload aside, I really think this is brilliant. A way for people to curate the source URLs of the web crawler for their search engine is something I think I could really get into.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
Something I would be interested in would be a true distributed “grep” for web pages. The service would take 2 regexes: 1 for the url and 1 for the content. It would then return the first 10,000 results of the pages that match both. The latency would likely be in hours, and I don’t think advertising would work for monetization, so it would be a pay for use service, but for deep searches, this might be valuable.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  It would likely not be very useful even ignoring the speed aspect. A lot of work goes into making a search engine understand how a term relates to a website, and to rank the results accordingly. You might get lucky and search for something that's in the goldie locks zone between underspecified and overspecified, and actually get good results, but in most cases you'd either get nothing or just noise. Unix grep works well because you're typically grepping in hundreds or thousands of documents, not hundreds of millions or billions.
jasoneckert 4y ago
It doesn't seem to accept regular expressions. Irony is not dead.
pzmarzly 4y ago
Not to be confused with a great search engine for GitHub named https://grep.app/ https://grep.app/
userbinator 4y ago
From the title I was expecting a search engine that actually works the way many of us would want search engines to, and not the "arbitrarily remove/rewrite your query to make it find what we want you to" that mainstream ones have become. Unfortunately, by the comments here and the description on the page itself, that seems to have been too optimistic.
f0e4c2f7 4y ago
Huh interesting concept. I like the way six degrees of separation from sources is shown under each result. That feels like pretty valuable information
dang 4y ago
All: please let's focus on something more interesting than the name collision. This is in the site guidelines: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
A search engine that forces people to "sign-in". There is a problem here and that is how to stop "users" from spamming the project with marketing garbage. If the "solution" is to collect more personal data from users, e.g., e-mail addresses, mobile phone numbers, multi-factor authentication, etc., as a prerequisite to even submitting a search query, then that is not a solution. It is an additional problem. Assuming the project is collecting personal data from users, e.g., peoples' search queries, where is the agreement that governs what the project is allowed to do with that data. If there is no agreement, then presumably the project can do whatever it wants. We can guess what happens next. Search engine as userdata-gathering exercise and commercial entity. Been there done that.
- BeetleB 4y ago
  Curious: Did you try it out before typing this up?
- collaborative 4y ago
  I recently came up with aisearch.vip (similar concept) and frankly, there is no way around this A future is coming where everything that isn't behind a login wall will be widely abused. ToS mean nothing in the era of AI. Quality searches will stop being free and cost actual money because the alternative is to drown the users in ads and, yes, monetize their data If you can't learn to establish trust with non-AI entities then..
  - rchaud 4y ago
    The reality is that your data privacy gets abused even when you do pay.
    - collaborative 4y ago
      Are you saying that you would abuse users' data if given the chance?
- deleted 4y ago
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yosito 4y ago
I absolutely love the idea. However, I found it a bit annoying that the sign up page is integrated with two companies I don't trust, Twitter and Google. I tried to sign up with an anonymous email address instead and got the error "Something went wrong".
- vignesh_warar 4y ago
  I think we have reached the quota or something. I will fix it. Thanks!
  - yosito 4y ago
    Thanks. I was able to get in this morning. The usage limit of only 20 queries seems pretty low. That's barely enough for me to try this out and see what it can do. It also seems that following some websites is difficult. For example, I wanted to follow Nomad List and Weather Spark, but neither came up in the list of options. I had to use a query to search for those sites before I could add them to my network.
    - vignesh_warar 4y ago
      Can you please mention how many queries are enough for you to get an impression of Grep? >It also seems that following some websites is difficult. For example, I wanted to follow Nomad List and Weather Spark... There is a feature on our roadmap where you can visit grep.help/nomadlist.com to follow the site, but it has not been shipped yet
- kevincox 4y ago
  I got that error too with email. It also seems like this is magic link authentication. It makes me bounce back and forth between my email client and the search engine I'm trying to use. Just let me set a password and my browser will auto-fill everything for secure one-click login.
cocoafleck 4y ago
Well, I don't know what to say other than that: a) I want to import my bookmarks b) I can't enter any of the domains I care about as I mostly have obscure tastes due to the above two issues I was unable to actually see how the product felt.
- vignesh_warar 4y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. We will soon be adding the bulk import feature where you can paste all the URLs and just follow them.
tYPKU 4y ago
search query limitation required registration. can't we have nice things anymore?
p-e-w 4y ago
No privacy policy, no mention how search data is being used, and Twitter and Discord as the only contact options? I like the idea, but those are some pretty major red flags. Additionally, the promise of "No AI-Content" appears to be snake oil unless the creators have discovered a magic formula for reliably distinguishing AI output from human output. With up to 7 degrees of separation, your search network is pretty much guaranteed to include AI-generated content, which will be indexed like any other content.
- vignesh_warar 4y ago
  I was planning to add those pages and did not expect Grep to be on the front page of HN. > Additionally, the promise of "No AI-Content" appears to be snake oil unless the creators have discovered a magic formula for reliably distinguishing AI output from human output. From my testing, at least within your network, I did not notice any AI-generated content. Even if you find any low-quality sites, you can simply block the previous node that refers to the site (yet to be shipped). Grep will remove all the sites that the previous node was linking to, including any AI-generated ones.
  - p-e-w 4y ago
    > I was planning to add those pages and did not expect Grep to be on the front page of HN. Fair enough, but a privacy policy isn't a "nice to have", it's a legal requirement (in many jurisdictions) before you can start collecting email addresses and other PII. It's a very bad idea to push such things to later. > From my testing, at least within your network, I did not notice any AI-generated content. That doesn't mean anything. Humans cannot reliably recognize AI-generated content. Why do you think all kinds of institutions are so afraid of it? If it were obvious whether something is made by an AI, there would be no problem.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  > Additionally, the promise of "No AI-Content" appears to be snake oil unless the creators have discovered a magic formula for reliably distinguishing AI output from human output. With up to 7 degrees of separation, your search network is pretty much guaranteed to include AI-generated content, which will be indexed like any other content. You can fairly effectively apply network topology heuristics to the link graph to separate the wheat from the chaff. Content farms tend to have different linking patterns from organic content. (Overall, few humans tend to link to them)
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gregorvand 4y ago
FirebaseError: Firebase: Exceeded daily quota for email sign-in. (auth/quota-exceeded).
- Alifatisk 4y ago
  That's a good error
vignesh_warar 4y ago
Hello all, I am Vignesh, developer here. I just saw grep.help on the front page and I will answer the comments.
- vignesh_warar 4y ago
  Just noticed, it seems like you all did not like the name. Here is the reason why we liked the name. Grep is a great CLI tool that always gives the right answers if your query is correct. I wanted Grep.help to do the same for your personal network.
  - Yiin 4y ago
    Sure, but it will be impossible for users to find your product on any search engine unless thry already know full address of it. It's like naming a password manager "ssh".
  - StockHuman 4y ago
    If I built a platform that leveraged the name brand of another with a similar purpose, but charged for it when the original was a well-respected community tool, it would not be seen as good form. SoundCloud.help, say, a platform that leverages SC’s reputation in the DJ mixes community to advertise a platform for algorithmic audio compilations would be received rather poorly. If grep.help was some newbie-friendly url shortener for grep documentation or examples, I think we’d be more enthusiastic.
jeffrallen 4y ago
No Trash Search also searches from a restricted list of websites: https://notrashsearch.github.io/about.html https://notrashsearch.github.io/about.html
mutagen 4y ago
I’ve built up a large collection of bookmarks on pinboard.in, I’d like to point this at my collection and have a go at searching the network.
- moneywoes 4y ago
  What’s pinboard?
  - mutagen 4y ago
    https://pinboard.in/about/ https://pinboard.in/about/ Social booking site, rose to prominence a little over 10 years ago after del.icio.us was bought by Yahoo and started to suck. Wound up buying del.icio.us. The creator, Maciej Ceglowski, is a good writer with a blog at https://idlewords.com/ https://idlewords.com/
- vignesh_warar 4y ago
  That's a good feature. We will add a bulk import input where you can paste all the URLs and follow them.
moneywoes 4y ago
Any insight on the tech side how your recursively scrape these n order connections? Very interested
- vignesh_warar 4y ago
  By default, Grep will go up to 4 degrees, but if your network of sites is less than 70K, then it will go up to 7 degrees to reach the 70K threshold.
jasfi 4y ago
I had this idea years ago, but I thought that Google would outdo it, even with the customization. But that was before mega sites like StackOverflow. This may now be plausible.
aabbcc1241 4y ago
I'm also working on a search engine that only index pages that actual human read. Currently it only work for a single user in self hosted manner. In the future it may allow you to integrate the index of your trusted peer (similar to following another user on twitter). The project is on https://github.com/beenotung/personal-search-engine https://github.com/beenotung/personal-search-engine

Hey, I tried signing up but the "Magic Link" never sent me an email.

I like the idea, I'll give this site a try and come back with some feedback. Update, the quota of "10 free searches per month." is not enough for me to try out. Still, interesting idea.

mthoms 4y ago
Where were you able to find that? I'm so sick of services that hide their pricing or free trial restrictions until after you have signed up. These days, they are an immediate "NO" from me. If the team is that customer hostile from the start, how are they going to act later when you've become invested in their service? Startups: Just be upfront about what you are offering and let me decide if it's worth it. /rant
- Alifatisk 4y ago
  I understand you. I had to sign in to find that out.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Yeah, that's a total showstopper for me. If I have to sign up to find out the terms and pricing, then I'm not signing up.
    - crispinb 4y ago
      I can't see how this isn't a basic decency filter for anyone using any web site. A paid site must at a minimum make the price easy to find. Otherwise I won't even continue to read or browse, let alone sign up. I'm gone, and I won't be back.
  - GolDDranks 4y ago
    I signed up, but turns out I couldn't search even once. It, for reason showed that I have already used 10/10 of my searches. Seems like a bug.
  - Atlas22 4y ago
    Yup, same here. Was under the impression that it was free. I don't see any option to delete my account now either, awesome. :|
    - 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
      Thanks for TOFTT
vignesh_warar 4y ago
Hey, I will increase the quota to 20 free searches per month. Thanks! I just realized that 10 will not be enough.

techdragon 4y ago

I’ve built several variations of a “Grep” search engine, and it usually stops at “I can’t find a ranking algorithm to go with regular expression searching the internet”. I say this to highlight that I really wasn’t expecting the pricing model and search method that’s in use here when I heard the site was “grep”

JohnFen 4y ago

What is it with newer projects coopting the name of existing stuff lately? First it was the term "crypto", then it's "LoRa", and now we have a "grep" that isn't. This is quickly becoming a pet peeve of mine, as it's really polluting search results if you want to find the original things.

youssefabdelm 4y ago
Agree, but it's obvious why... this is how they get clicks
b33j0r 4y ago
Here’s one for ya. The very first thing ever named in [one biblical version of] history was “apple.” Unlike other disputes that people claim are ancient… the Apple dispute is still being fought, from Newton to the Beatles to genetically pure Honeycrisp. Naming things is still the Lord’s most difficult commandment (probably a reference to RMS, I’m not sure anymore).
- schoen 4y ago
  > The very first thing ever named in [one biblical version of] history was “apple.” I'm not sure how to get that! The first noun in Genesis is either "beginning" or "God", depending on whether you take בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית as something like an adverb. (1:1) The first noun mentioned as spoken is "light". (1:3) The first noun mentioned as spoken in a conversation involving a human is "earth". (1:28) The first noun mentioned as spoken by a human is either "time" or "bone", depending on whether you take הַפַּעַם as something like an adverb. (2:23)
  - chrismorgan 4y ago
    … and there’s no apple at all. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not identified with any tree now known, nor is its fruit identified.
    - b33j0r 4y ago

meremortal 4y ago

I'm a software developer for search technology platforms and this choice for a name is a terrible one. facepalm It would have been much much smarter to choose a term that wasn't already broadly used. Even more mystifying is that someone would do this IF THEY KNEW ANYTHING ABOUT SEARCH ENGINES. Pick a different name, don't make your new offering compete with thousands of other search results explaining how GNU grep works. An even bigger sin is the fact that grep is already used for searching and if even someone is looking for your site after forgetting the website, they are gonna have a fun time finding your offering vs scads of linux tutorials. This is BASIC marketing level SEO knowledge, you don't even need a search architect to tell you this info. Good luck in any case. Do yourself a favor and pick another name if you want any traction.

lisasays 4y ago
Even more mystifying is that someone would do this IF THEY KNEW ANYTHING ABOUT SEARCH ENGINES. This is BASIC marketing level SEO knowledge, you don't even need a search architect to tell you this info. I agree. The irony here is simply profound.
dang 4y ago
Name complaints are generally covered by these guidelines from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- chrismorgan 4y ago
  I think name complaints are actually more reasonable here than they often are, especially as demonstrated in this comment you’re responding to: a search engine has to concern itself with such matters, so when a search engine deliberately names itself provocatively⸻ Anyway, I’m stopping there. I just thought this perspective worth mentioning.

darkteflon 4y ago

Wonderful idea. I pay for Kagi and would happily pay for something like this (Kagi sort of has an analogue, called “lenses”). But, as other commenters have (imo correctly) pointed out: absolute head-scratcher of a name - especially for a _search _ engine. So much so that it makes me question their judgement more broadly. And, concealed pricing info is a flat-out non-starter for me.

vignesh_warar 4y ago
Thanks for feedback. Here is the reason why we liked the name. Grep is a great CLI tool that always gives the right answers if your query is correct. I wanted Grep.help to do the same for your personal network. > And, concealed pricing info is a flat-out non-starter for me. I will mention this on the front page of grep.
- jarofgreen 4y ago
  There is another serious point about the name I haven't yet seen any comments on. Grep the open source project has spent years building up it's name and it's good will by being - as you point out - a great tool. You are now attempting to claim some of that good will just by copying the name when you have nothing to do with grep. If you did that to a commercial company they'd sue you for trademark infringement. (Hopefully this is a serious enough point to not count as a "tangential annoyance")
  - kashyapc 4y ago
    It's absolutely not a "tangential annoyance" in this case. Your serious point is critical and it must be considered.
- prox 4y ago
  I’ve seen dang’s comment but I agree here. While it’s great you admire a tool, overwriting it with a similar name is bad form and delutes your message instead of strengthening your message as you intended. Personally I would reconsider a name that may sound similar but also is different enough.

up6w6 4y ago

I guess it isn't related to grep.app, which is an excellent code search engine, right?

GolDDranks 4y ago

Hmm, I tried it with one query, and it immediately said "Search quota exceeded, please upgrade". I got the impression that there would be at least a few free queries, so it seems like a bug?

lucb1e 4y ago
CGNAT maybe or sharing your IP address with others some other way? It worked for me, I tried 3 queries if that helps.
- vignesh_warar 4y ago
  We don't log IP address.
vignesh_warar 4y ago
Could you kindly clear the cache and try again?

djha-skin 4y ago

My minor annoyance at the name overload aside, I really think this is brilliant. A way for people to curate the source URLs of the web crawler for their search engine is something I think I could really get into.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

Something I would be interested in would be a true distributed “grep” for web pages. The service would take 2 regexes: 1 for the url and 1 for the content. It would then return the first 10,000 results of the pages that match both. The latency would likely be in hours, and I don’t think advertising would work for monetization, so it would be a pay for use service, but for deep searches, this might be valuable.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
It would likely not be very useful even ignoring the speed aspect. A lot of work goes into making a search engine understand how a term relates to a website, and to rank the results accordingly. You might get lucky and search for something that's in the goldie locks zone between underspecified and overspecified, and actually get good results, but in most cases you'd either get nothing or just noise. Unix grep works well because you're typically grepping in hundreds or thousands of documents, not hundreds of millions or billions.

jasoneckert 4y ago

It doesn't seem to accept regular expressions. Irony is not dead.

pzmarzly 4y ago

Not to be confused with a great search engine for GitHub named https://grep.app/ https://grep.app/

userbinator 4y ago

From the title I was expecting a search engine that actually works the way many of us would want search engines to, and not the "arbitrarily remove/rewrite your query to make it find what we want you to" that mainstream ones have become. Unfortunately, by the comments here and the description on the page itself, that seems to have been too optimistic.

f0e4c2f7 4y ago

Huh interesting concept. I like the way six degrees of separation from sources is shown under each result. That feels like pretty valuable information

dang 4y ago

All: please let's focus on something more interesting than the name collision. This is in the site guidelines: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

A search engine that forces people to "sign-in". There is a problem here and that is how to stop "users" from spamming the project with marketing garbage. If the "solution" is to collect more personal data from users, e.g., e-mail addresses, mobile phone numbers, multi-factor authentication, etc., as a prerequisite to even submitting a search query, then that is not a solution. It is an additional problem. Assuming the project is collecting personal data from users, e.g., peoples' search queries, where is the agreement that governs what the project is allowed to do with that data. If there is no agreement, then presumably the project can do whatever it wants. We can guess what happens next. Search engine as userdata-gathering exercise and commercial entity. Been there done that.

BeetleB 4y ago
Curious: Did you try it out before typing this up?
collaborative 4y ago
I recently came up with aisearch.vip (similar concept) and frankly, there is no way around this A future is coming where everything that isn't behind a login wall will be widely abused. ToS mean nothing in the era of AI. Quality searches will stop being free and cost actual money because the alternative is to drown the users in ads and, yes, monetize their data If you can't learn to establish trust with non-AI entities then..
- rchaud 4y ago
  The reality is that your data privacy gets abused even when you do pay.
  - collaborative 4y ago
    Are you saying that you would abuse users' data if given the chance?
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yosito 4y ago

I absolutely love the idea. However, I found it a bit annoying that the sign up page is integrated with two companies I don't trust, Twitter and Google. I tried to sign up with an anonymous email address instead and got the error "Something went wrong".

vignesh_warar 4y ago
I think we have reached the quota or something. I will fix it. Thanks!
- yosito 4y ago
  Thanks. I was able to get in this morning. The usage limit of only 20 queries seems pretty low. That's barely enough for me to try this out and see what it can do. It also seems that following some websites is difficult. For example, I wanted to follow Nomad List and Weather Spark, but neither came up in the list of options. I had to use a query to search for those sites before I could add them to my network.
  - vignesh_warar 4y ago
    Can you please mention how many queries are enough for you to get an impression of Grep? >It also seems that following some websites is difficult. For example, I wanted to follow Nomad List and Weather Spark... There is a feature on our roadmap where you can visit grep.help/nomadlist.com to follow the site, but it has not been shipped yet
kevincox 4y ago
I got that error too with email. It also seems like this is magic link authentication. It makes me bounce back and forth between my email client and the search engine I'm trying to use. Just let me set a password and my browser will auto-fill everything for secure one-click login.

cocoafleck 4y ago

Well, I don't know what to say other than that: a) I want to import my bookmarks b) I can't enter any of the domains I care about as I mostly have obscure tastes due to the above two issues I was unable to actually see how the product felt.

vignesh_warar 4y ago
Thanks for the feedback. We will soon be adding the bulk import feature where you can paste all the URLs and just follow them.

tYPKU 4y ago

search query limitation required registration. can't we have nice things anymore?

p-e-w 4y ago

No privacy policy, no mention how search data is being used, and Twitter and Discord as the only contact options? I like the idea, but those are some pretty major red flags. Additionally, the promise of "No AI-Content" appears to be snake oil unless the creators have discovered a magic formula for reliably distinguishing AI output from human output. With up to 7 degrees of separation, your search network is pretty much guaranteed to include AI-generated content, which will be indexed like any other content.

vignesh_warar 4y ago
I was planning to add those pages and did not expect Grep to be on the front page of HN. > Additionally, the promise of "No AI-Content" appears to be snake oil unless the creators have discovered a magic formula for reliably distinguishing AI output from human output. From my testing, at least within your network, I did not notice any AI-generated content. Even if you find any low-quality sites, you can simply block the previous node that refers to the site (yet to be shipped). Grep will remove all the sites that the previous node was linking to, including any AI-generated ones.
- p-e-w 4y ago
  > I was planning to add those pages and did not expect Grep to be on the front page of HN. Fair enough, but a privacy policy isn't a "nice to have", it's a legal requirement (in many jurisdictions) before you can start collecting email addresses and other PII. It's a very bad idea to push such things to later. > From my testing, at least within your network, I did not notice any AI-generated content. That doesn't mean anything. Humans cannot reliably recognize AI-generated content. Why do you think all kinds of institutions are so afraid of it? If it were obvious whether something is made by an AI, there would be no problem.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
> Additionally, the promise of "No AI-Content" appears to be snake oil unless the creators have discovered a magic formula for reliably distinguishing AI output from human output. With up to 7 degrees of separation, your search network is pretty much guaranteed to include AI-generated content, which will be indexed like any other content. You can fairly effectively apply network topology heuristics to the link graph to separate the wheat from the chaff. Content farms tend to have different linking patterns from organic content. (Overall, few humans tend to link to them)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gregorvand 4y ago

FirebaseError: Firebase: Exceeded daily quota for email sign-in. (auth/quota-exceeded).

Alifatisk 4y ago
That's a good error

vignesh_warar 4y ago

Hello all, I am Vignesh, developer here. I just saw grep.help on the front page and I will answer the comments.

vignesh_warar 4y ago
Just noticed, it seems like you all did not like the name. Here is the reason why we liked the name. Grep is a great CLI tool that always gives the right answers if your query is correct. I wanted Grep.help to do the same for your personal network.
- Yiin 4y ago
  Sure, but it will be impossible for users to find your product on any search engine unless thry already know full address of it. It's like naming a password manager "ssh".
- StockHuman 4y ago
  If I built a platform that leveraged the name brand of another with a similar purpose, but charged for it when the original was a well-respected community tool, it would not be seen as good form. SoundCloud.help, say, a platform that leverages SC’s reputation in the DJ mixes community to advertise a platform for algorithmic audio compilations would be received rather poorly. If grep.help was some newbie-friendly url shortener for grep documentation or examples, I think we’d be more enthusiastic.

jeffrallen 4y ago

No Trash Search also searches from a restricted list of websites: https://notrashsearch.github.io/about.html https://notrashsearch.github.io/about.html

mutagen 4y ago

I’ve built up a large collection of bookmarks on pinboard.in, I’d like to point this at my collection and have a go at searching the network.

moneywoes 4y ago
What’s pinboard?
- mutagen 4y ago
  https://pinboard.in/about/ https://pinboard.in/about/ Social booking site, rose to prominence a little over 10 years ago after del.icio.us was bought by Yahoo and started to suck. Wound up buying del.icio.us. The creator, Maciej Ceglowski, is a good writer with a blog at https://idlewords.com/ https://idlewords.com/
vignesh_warar 4y ago
That's a good feature. We will add a bulk import input where you can paste all the URLs and follow them.

moneywoes 4y ago

Any insight on the tech side how your recursively scrape these n order connections? Very interested

vignesh_warar 4y ago
By default, Grep will go up to 4 degrees, but if your network of sites is less than 70K, then it will go up to 7 degrees to reach the 70K threshold.

jasfi 4y ago

I had this idea years ago, but I thought that Google would outdo it, even with the customization. But that was before mega sites like StackOverflow. This may now be plausible.

aabbcc1241 4y ago

I'm also working on a search engine that only index pages that actual human read. Currently it only work for a single user in self hosted manner. In the future it may allow you to integrate the index of your trusted peer (similar to following another user on twitter). The project is on https://github.com/beenotung/personal-search-engine https://github.com/beenotung/personal-search-engine